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Monday, 10 October 2016

Scottish Cup, Round 1: Facsimile of Steak

When the draw for the first round proper of the Scottish Cup was made,I drew up a wish
list of the ties I fancied attending. As a football tourist with no fixed
loyalties, my plan for this year’s competition is to visit some grounds and,
perhaps, some places I’ve never visited before. A number of intriguing
possibilities presented themselves, but events conspired against me. The weekend
of those first round ties coincided with my wedding anniversary and my wife had
selfishly booked a weekend abroad to celebrate. Not only did she expect me to
go with her, she could not be persuaded that a visit to Deveronvale, Galashiels
or Inverness to watch a first round Scottish Cup tie would surpass any of the supposed
delights to be found abroad. Astonishing, I know.

While I was away, I found it difficult to keep up with the scores. You’d think that
most of the major news agencies would want to keep the world abreast of Beith
Athletic v Strathspey Thistle or Inverurie Locos v Buckie Thistle, but even the
Scottish Football Association’s website was tardy about posting the results. Upon
returning to Scotland, I was relieved to find that the dedicated Scottish Cup
channel on youtube contained brief highlights from most of the ties. I’ve been at games where the ‘highlight’ has
been a fight between players, a comedic goalkeeping blunder or a dog running on
to the pitch, so I was hoping that the youtube clips would do a bit more than
just focus on the goals. As if to conform to the stereotypical view of Scottish football, the first round
produced a few goalkeeping errors. In the game between Keith and Banks o’ Dee,
the Dee centre forward manages to score from a difficult angle, mainly because
the home goalie, in a foolish attempt to feign nonchalance, allows the ball to
run past him, clearly expecting it to go out of play. Only once the nippy
striker has played the ball across him and into the empty goal does he realise
that he might just have made a catastrophic error of judgement. As he puts his
hand up to his head (as if to say: “Damn
… I knew I had forgotten something. My job is to stop the other team from
scoring”), you can’t help but respect him for having the grace not to try
and pin the blame on his defenders.

(As an
aside, if there ever was a United Kingdom non-league cup, I’d like to see Keith
drawn to play Leigh, with the winners away to Dave in the next round).

If
everyone attending the game between Civil Service Strollers and Hawick Royal Albert
had brought a pal, the crowd would still have been on the ‘lean’ side of sparse.
The few who attended witnessed the Hawick custodian dropping a clanger of Clemencian proportions to allow a soft equaliser.
Supporters of a certain vintage will understand that reference, while younger
readers may wish to google ‘Scotland v England, Hampden Park, 1976’ to see what
I mean. On a
positive goalkeeping note, the Wick Academy goalie made the save of the round
in their 3-1 victory away at Dalbeattie Star. Wick is the most northerly
professional league club in the United Kingdom, but they took what sounded like
a decent support to a tie in which the home team had a man sent off for the
heinous crime of ‘falling’ and another dismissed for saying something naughty to
the referee. The man in the middle featured rather a lot in the brief
highlights package, which isn’t a good sign; as a general rule of thumb, the referees
you don’t notice are better than the ones you do. At
Claggan Park, in the foothills of Ben Nevis, Fort William got clobbered 4-1 by
Brora Rangers, their only consolation coming from the knowledge that their
ground was more picturesque than most. Miles down the west coast, at Girvan-in-the-gloom,
the home side lost 2-1 to Huntly. This game also featured a controversial
refereeing decision, when a very good home shout for a late penalty was turned
down. If I were a Girvan fan, I would definitely have been chanting “Who’s the
teuchter in the black?” By the sounds of it, the best atmosphere was at the
Inverurie Loco Works v Buckie Thistle match, where the Buckie boys, in their not-quite-Celtic
strip, knocked six past the home keeper. By coincidence, the victorious team
featured a John Hartson lookey-likey, who almost scored a spectacular goal from
inside the centre circle.

If you
watch the highlights of Turiff’s game with Bonnyrigg, look out for the
middle-aged guy in the shirt and tie standing on the stairs in the little stand
behind the goal. His celebratory jig after Turiff open the scoring is delightful;
my guess would be that he runs the club bar and that he was already dreaming of
Celtic, Rangers, Hearts or Aberdeen visiting the town. ‘Just think of what we’ll take at the bar’ he expresses, through the
medium of dance; or, if not ‘dance’, then the medium of jumping about and
shouting ‘Yaas!’ Unfortunately, his
team got cuffed 4-1 in the replay.

One of
the best things about these youtube clips is the fact that they don’t have any commentary,
which means you invariably pick up some fruity contributions from the
spectators. There is a lovely little moment in the game between Deveronvale and
Gretna 2008 (a reformed club which, in a previous incarnation, came within a
penalty shoot-out of winning the Cup). Already trailing by a goal, the home defence,
stumbling around like drunk men trying to avoid standing on lego, concede a soft
second, at which point you can hear an anguished cry of “That’s a shambles!” I can just picture the guy who shouted this. He’ll
be a lifelong fan, middle-aged and unable to break the football habit his old
man got him into. I’d wager that, on many a Saturday afternoon, he’ll have let
his eyes stray from the pitch across to Banff Bay and, in a quiet moment of
existential angst, asked himself why the hell he has paid money to watch this
pish. Just listen to that plaintive “That’s
a shambles!” and tell me that you don’t feel his pain.

The most
exciting tie was undoubtedly at Mosset Park, home of Forres Mechanics, where
the match with Lossiemouth provided a great example of early-round cup-tie
football, red in tooth and claw. Among several moments to savour is the 94thminute
equaliser by the home goalkeeper, Stuart Knight, who comes up for a corner and
scores with what, at first glance, appears to be a header, but a closer look
reveals that he probably knocked the ball in with his clavicle. Scenes of wild
abandonment follow as fans and players invade the pitch, while Lossiemouth reel
from the sense that some kind of injustice has occurred. But there was no injustice;
it was clearly a clavicle flick, as Stuart might have said in a post-match
interview on Sky Sports Scottish Cup Special:

"Yeah, no, I’ve gone up for the
corner in the last-minute. Dazza’s whipped it across and I’ve lost my marker
and just got the clavicle on it. Credit to the lads, we’ve worked on that at
training all week and it’s obviously paid off. But like I said, it’s not about
one player, or one player’s clavicle. It’s about getting this football club into
the next round of the cup.”

I’ve
never been to Grant Street Park, home of Inverness Clachnacuddin, but it looks like
a great little lower-league venue. Watching the highlights from their tie with
Stirling University illustrates, among other things, why the home club chose
not to be part of the entity formed in Inverness in 1994. With a place in the
Scottish League in the offing, two of the three Highland League clubs then playing
in Inverness -Caledonian and Thistle- amalgamated (in spite of lots of
opposition from supporters of both sides) to form a club called, unsurprisingly
enough, Inverness Caledonian Thistle. It’s just as well that Clach, formed in
1885 (yes, they’re older than Celtic), didn’t want any part of it, because if
they had, the new team might have had the longest name in world football:
Inverness Caledonian Clachnacuddin Thistle. Or maybe Inverness Clachnacuddin
Caledonian Thistle. I’d probably have gone for Athletico Inverness Clachnacuddin
Thistle Caledonian Rovers, just to cover all the angles. The merged neighbours have
since worked their way to the top national division, while Clach have remained
as a Highland League club. I’ve no idea whether or not they have any ambitions
to join the Scottish League, but it’s clear that if they ever do, it will be done
on their own terms. Behind one of the goals at Grant Street, there is a
structure called the ‘1947-48 Clean Sweep Enclosure’, commemorating the season
that Clach won the Highland League, the Scottish Qualifying Cup, the Highland League
Cup and the North of Scotland Cup. In spite of this illustrious history, they
contrived to lose 2-1 to Stirling University, although -for what it’s worth- I
don’t think all of those Stirling lads looked like students.

Scottish
football has recently witnessed the emergence of several ‘new model’ football
clubs, including Edusport Academy, East Kilbride, Cumbernauld Colts and BSC
Glasgow, each professing to take a community-oriented approach to football
development. For all of the worthiness of these projects, I find the idea of seeking
out a cup tie at East Kilbride or Cumbernauld somewhat unappealing, for a
variety of reasons. I’m not going to say anything about the aesthetics of town
planning here; I’ll merely observe that both of those settlements are close
enough to my home city to be quite familiar. The size of the respective
populations has been used to support the case for professional clubs in these
towns, but a few inconvenient, elephant-in-the-room
sized facts get in the way. For one thing, the West of Scotland is not exactly
short of football clubs; for another, both towns are very close to Glasgow and
the football-minded folk are almost certainly Rangers or Celtic supporters
already. Twenty years after Clyde moved to Cumbernauld from the south side of
Glasgow, their average attendance at home games is around 500. They share their
home with Cumbernauld Colts, who were granted more than half a million pounds
of public money to develop their facilities and install a 3G pitch. According to their website, Colts have more than 330
playing members, with “four operating strands, a senior male first team, a
female first team, an extensive grassroots Football Academy and ‘Colts in the
Community’, which provides a range of community-focused outreach programmes that
are delivered throughout the year.”

Cumbernauld
has a population of 52,000. This may sound brutal, but have a look at the
highlights from the home team’s 1-0 replay win over Leith and take a guess as
to how many people in the town are interested in watching the team.

Where the
grounds of Deveronvale and Clach are picturesque or characterful, East
Kilbride’s is bleakly utilitarian, with a synthetic pitch and a big green fence
behind one of the goals. It looks like one of the least soulful sporting venues
on the planet, but at least the team is pretty decent. They shared ten goals
with Vale of Leithen in their first round tie, although -as the home team- they
insisted on their share being 90%. Last year, East Kilbride got to the last
sixteen of the Cup and only lost by two goals to the mighty Celtic, a result
which had the hoops supporters incandescent with rage on the radio phone-ins. East
Kilbride was formed as recently as 2010, with the intention of bringing senior
football to one of Scotland's largest towns. Their motto is ‘a priori’, which indicates an attempt to claim a
heritage link with clubs which previously existed in or around the town. It has 28 teams and over 600 players in all age groups; according to their
website, they “also have a thriving Sunday Club for children with Additional
Support Needs and an ever growing Girls Section with girls from 6 to 15 years.”

There is
a scene in David Cronenberg’s 1983 horror sci-fi film ‘The Fly’ in which the brilliant
scientist Seth Brundle (played by Jeff Goldblum) is trying to perfect a transportation
device. He has two giant ‘teleporting’ pods set up in his laboratory, with
which he successfully transports non-organic matter from one side of the room
to the other. He understands that the next stage of his experimentation must involve
the successful transportation of organic matter. As he works towards this astounding
goal, he decides to transport a steak from one pod to the other before persuading
his journalist girlfriend (Veronica, played by Geena Davis) to eat it. Upon
trying the teleported ‘steak’ she gags, because it tastes horrible, lifeless and
synthetic. It looks like a steak but it isn’t really a steak. It’s something
else; it’s a facsimile of a steak. And that, in my middle-aged, conservative,
‘things-were-different-in-my-day’ prejudice is what I feel about some of these
new clubs. They do lots of good work, particularly when it comes to encouraging
community participation; they are licensed by the Scottish Football Association;
they have all the correct procedures and policies and can attract the kind of funders
interested in supporting politically-prescribed notions of social gain.

I can accept
that pretty much anything that gets hundreds of people exercising on a regular
basis is, in and of itself, a good thing. But, deep in my gut, I feel no
emotional connection to these socially-aware enterprises with their aims and
objectives that go far beyond winning a few games of football.

By
contrast, although I don’t actively support teams like Ayr United, Queen of the
South or Clachnacuddin, I can still feel some kind of emotional connection with
them. These clubs (and others like them) play in their own unique temples of ramshackle
beauty, each one echoing memories of glorious successes, inglorious failures,
moments of low comedy and high farce. A football club is -among other things- a
living socio-cultural document and the players who pull on those jerseys are
representing more than just a club or a town; they are writing another chapter
in history.

I’m not
an idiot. I understand that ‘new’ history can be made. When Caley and Thistle
merged to form that club in Inverness in 1994, few would have predicted that
they would work their way so quickly through the league structure and make such
a great contribution to the Scottish game. In ‘The Fly’, Veronica’s ‘steak-tasting’
moment presaged a world transformed by the possibilities of molecular deconstruction
and successful re-assembly; perhaps, like her, I’m just on the wrong side of a significant
historical development.

Perhaps I’m
wrong to believe that the last thing Scottish football needs is some new
professional clubs; perhaps I’m wrong to state that public money might best be
focused on celebrating, preserving and developing the clubs we already have.
Perhaps I’m wrong and there are
thousands of people in Cumbernauld and East Kilbride keen to find an
alternative to bussing it into Glasgow to watch the Old Firm trample on their
latest victims.

Perhaps,
in time, these new clubs will accumulate enough history to be something other
than what they currently appear to be: facsimiles of steak.

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.